Capitalist paradox
Anyone else find it interesting that capitalism is predicted on the idea that infinite growth is possible, therefore that infinite resources exist, but somehow also there isn't enough to share?
Capitalist paradox
@sneak Money requires infinite growth. Money has to be with less and less over time so people spend or invest it instead of just removing it from circulation. If people took money out of circulation, the economy would collapse. Imagine if all currency worked like Bitcoin, and you can see why that doesn't work...
Capitalist paradox
@sneak Since competition within the capitalist market place is basically a genetic algorithm where the fitness function is how much money you can leverage, capitalism has infinite growth baked right in to it's functional prerequisites.
Money becomes worth less over time, so you have to constantly consume more money. But also, the value you need to compete increases with each generation because bigger organizations will just consume you to make more money...
Capitalist paradox
@Hex none of the things you have described have anything to do with capitalism. i'm confused how you have conflated fiat inflation and capitalism, when the former was promoted as a social good hundreds of years after the invention of the latter.
Capitalist paradox
@Hex "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."
Capitalist paradox
@sneak that's a useless definition because "private owners for profit" could be workers owning the means of production and controlling then as independent democratic collectives that use markets... Which is a type of socialism. If you remove "for profit" it could as easily be almost any form of anarchism, and if you read it strictly there is no such thing as capitalism anywhere in the world...
Capitalist paradox
@sneak there are a few defining factors of capitalism: private ownership of the means of production, ownership of things produced by the means of production rather than ownership coming from labor, and the right to own the means of production even when it's used by others. The fact that ownership comes from property not labor is the defining factor...
Capitalist paradox
@sneak this definition is also free of the "fiat currency" thing (I'm not agreeing that isn't actually part of capitalism, just using a definition that omits it). I've also omitted markets from the definition. They could be included or not, but they do exist outside of capitalism.
If you disagree with this definition, I'd be happy to hear an alternative definition that's more useful than googling "define:capitalism..."
Capitalist paradox
@sneak everything I've described has everything to do with the definition you gave, so if that's not the case let's figure out a shared definition that we can start from.
Capitalist paradox
@Hex sorry that you asked me for a definition then i gave you an exact one then you called it useless because it wasn't the one you were already using when you farcically demanded that i define it for you
Capitalist paradox
@Hex turns out the ills you ascribe to capitalism actually have nothing at all to do with capitalism as it is defined by humans on earth (this definition is quite different than the one used by ideologues)
Capitalist paradox
@sneak your profile says you're a hacker, so you have to understand that documentation often doesn't match implementation. We're talking about flaws in a system. Capitalism is a system. The definition you gave is not the definition of a system.
It's like if you told some dev they should have XSS in their threat model and they said their ORM didn't have it, so you were like "that's strange, send me the docs so I can check that." Then they googled ORM and sent that.
Capitalist paradox
@sneak if you claim there isn't a flaw in a system, when it's widely understood to be a fundamental flaw in the system, then you need to account for the delta. Maybe it's a different definition, fine, we can work with that. Maybe it's not a part or the system you realized exists, fine, we can work with that.
So I proposed a definition of a system based on observations. You can propose an alternative definition. But we can't get anywhere without a real definition.
Capitalist paradox
Capitalist paradox
@sneak but also infinite growth is a prerequisite to ideological acceptance of capitalism by anyone who doesn't already own capital. There are 3 options if you don't have capital:
1) you accept that you and all future generations remain wage slaves forever,
2) you fight against your oppressor (either inside the system as competition or outside as revolution), or
3) you believe that through infinite growth you or your offspring too will once wear the boot...
Capitalist paradox
@sneak capitalism without infinite growth is literally definition of the game of Monopoly.
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Capitalist paradox
@sneak i should have said something like infinite growth is "assumed," but, yeah, infinite growth is a required because capitalism is a Ponzi scheme. The only way it keeps going is by consuming more resources and borrowing from the next generation...